The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Document Outline

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introducing creative writing
  • An open space
    • The iceberg
    • New worlds
    • Why we write
    • A balance
  • Learning to write
    • A continent
    • Imagination’s talent
    • A play of mind
    • A psychological apprenticeship
    • Passion
    • Vocation’s providence
    • Honesty of the amateur
    • Purposes
  • Creative writing in time
    • Inventions of creative writing
    • Rhetoric’s play
    • A tradition of revolution
  • The school of wildness
    • Necessary wildness
    • What wildness is shaping
    • A total process
    • Creative communities
    • The sister arts
  • Reading and the individual writer
    • Why we read
    • Language’s music
    • Creative reading
    • Reading across time
    • Reading across taste
    • Appetites and abilities
    • A new maze
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 2 Creative writing in the world
  • Creative writing and creative criticism
    • Reflective criticism
    • Writing reflective essays
    • Reading yourself as a writer
    • Notional subjectivity
  • Classrooms on the world
    • Writing as teaching
    • A marriage of heaven and hell
  • Experience
    • Capturing ideas for writing
    • What we know and what we do not know
    • Writing against your experience
  • Freedom, play and magic
    • Creative writing and freedom of expression
    • Serious play
    • Serious difficulty
    • Language’s magic
    • Rediscovering pleasure
  • Publishing and editing
    • Circles for survival
    • Group criticism
    • Etiquette for writers
    • The editor
    • Creative writing and the publishing industry
    • The saints of the small press
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 3 Challenges of creative writing
  • Challenges to writers
    • Indifference
    • Rival media
    • Sentimentality, or kitsch
    • Displacement activity
    • Talking it away
    • Criticism and journalism
    • Fantasy and perfectionism
    • Politics
    • Pagefright and word-blindedness
    • Out of depth
    • Self-doubt
    • Work–life balance
    • Youth-envy
    • Age
    • Children
  • Challenges of translation
    • What is lost in translation
    • Stealing across a spectrum
    • Variation’s mirror
  • Challenges of experiment
    • The OuLiPo
    • Exercises in style
    • An Oulipean Sunday school exercise
  • The challenge of design
    • Restrictive liberation
    • Restriction in poetry and fiction two examples
    • Form’s game
    • Against design
  • The challenge of quality
    • Perception and reception
    • Assessing creative writing
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 4 Composition and creative writing
  • Habits of mind, principles of practice
    • Parallels of practice
    • Writing badly and over-writing
    • Forces of language
    • No maps
  • Discipline
    • How to be good
    • How to be bad
  • Notebooks and rituals
    • Recording and practice
    • Dreams
    • Fieldwork for writers
    • Fetishes of composition
  • Composition’s action
    • Movement
    • Props and prompts for action
    • A mental switch
    • Freewriting
    • Negative capability
    • Inspiration and duende
  • Language’s mercury
  • Influence and imitation
  • Workshops as open spaces
    • Purposes
    • Origins
    • Dynamics
    • Homogeneity
    • The generative workshop
    • The responsive workshop
    • Hazards
    • Critical not personal investment
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 5 Processes of creative writing
  • Seven processes
    • Preparing
    • Planning
    • Incubation
    • Beginning
    • Flowing
    • The silence reservoir
    • Breakthroughs and finish lines
    • On titles
  • The writer post-performance
    • Rewriting
    • Failing, and failing better
    • Deadlines as lifelines
    • Your challenger
  • Precisions of process
    • Raiding the languages of elsewhere
    • Precision and voice
  • Confidence and practice
    • The invisible audience
    • Suspensions of belief
  • Self’s voices
    • Voice
    • Placebo selves
    • The Other
    • Playing dead
    • Playing others
    • Being others
    • Effacement
    • Using depression
    • Change your life
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 6 The practice of fiction
  • Writing literary fiction
    • Flash fiction
    • Short story
    • Novella
    • Novel
  • Form and structure
    • Deciding your form
    • Subverting the form
  • Dreaming a fictional continuum
    • Plots and scene
  • Character is story
    • Finding characters
    • Character history
    • Main and viewpoint character
    • Believability
  • Storymaking
    • Point of view and narrative voice
    • Beginning
    • What if?
    • Conflict and crisis
    • Setting and time
    • Rewrites
    • The end
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 7 Creative nonfiction
  • Reality’s literature
    • Earlier models
    • Accuracy and art
  • Writing creative nonfiction
    • Devices
    • Basic structure
    • Subverting the structure
    • Speaking with the reader
    • Passion and involvement
  • Writing about yourself
    • The face of life
    • You area story
    • Memoir and memory
    • Pulling back
    • Knowledge is self-knowledge
  • Writing about people and the world
    • Finding a topic
    • Fieldwork and interviews
    • A literature of hope
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 8 Writing poetry
  • Listening to language
    • Metre and rhyme
    • Hearing your own nature
  • Finding language
    • Processes
    • Inside poems
  • Awakening language
    • Meaning and being
    • Subjects and ways of saying
  • Shaping language
    • Form
    • Free verse
    • Syllabics
    • Subverting form
    • Shaping a sequence and collection
  • Playing with language
    • Volcano and diamonds
  • Poetry’s reasons
    • A place for the genuine
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 9 Performing writing
  • Speaking and performing
    • The magic anthill
    • Audience as reader
    • Creating an audience
  • Voice work
    • The tongue’s arrow
    • Pools and stream of speech
    • Reading a reading
  • Reading techniques and music
    • A charm
    • Space
    • Set
    • A cold open
    • A silent rule
    • Blending music
    • Mushairas
  • Concept as performance
    • Subversions
    • Performing your writing as public art
  • Electronic performance
    • Transaesthetics
    • Collaborative performance
    • Blogs: wide open spaces
    • Distance learning
  • Recommended reading
• Chapter 10 Writing in the community and academy
  • Community as open space
    • Lights in the dark
    • Community as open space
    • The grassroots of creative writing
    • Rooms of our own
  • Creating writing in the creative academy
    • Creative writing across disciplines
    • Creative writing with science
    • Creative writing as a crossover discipline
    • Creative recognitions
  • Academy as open space
    • Wishes
    • Chimeras
    • Ideas
  • The door and the abyss
  • Recommended reading
• Illustrative bibliography
• Index